City police Detective Lt. Ken Zipovsky quotes an FBI statistic when teaching police cadets at Lackawanna College. Police solve 3 percent of cases by themselves. To solve the other 97 percent, police rely on information provided by someone on the community.

In Hazleton, nearly half the community is Latino.

The U.S. Census in 2010 said 37.3 percent of Hazleton's residents are Latino. Adding people whom the Census missed, DeAndrea estimates, pushes the total to nearly half the population.

Police are trying to overcome barriers - such as language, immigration status and attitudes about law enforcement that people developed in their home countries - so witnesses are more willing to offer information.

But DeAndrea said the larger task might involve helping the Anglo and Latino communities to consider themselves as one city.

"Everybody needs to recognize the only way for us to succeed is to become one," he said.

Mentioning the 1976 firebombing that killed Luzerne County Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boyarski and his family, DeAndrea reminds people whose families have lived in Hazleton for generations that the violent crime occurred before the most recent wave of immigration brought Latinos to the city.

The 1897 massacre of miners during a protest march in Lattimer, he said, illustrates the plight of some residents' ancestors when they emigrated to Hazleton.

After A.J. Goryl sustained debilitating injuries from a beating one year ago today, DeAndrea said police hung up posters in English and Spanish while seeking leads.

One officer, Detective Chris Orozco, who speaks fluent Spanish, stopped serving on an FBI gang task force and returned to full-time duty in the city because the police need his language skills.

DeAndrea would like the Police Civil Service Commission to change the ranking system so candidates for openings on the force get preference if they speak Spanish.

Rocco Formica, chairman of the commission, said changes in the ranking system for civil service candidates have to be made at the state level. The civil service rules, he added, give preference to no one based on ethnicity.

Developing a bilingual force is a long-term project because learning a language takes years, DeAndrea said. Meanwhile, he will draw help from the public.

"We may never have 20 cops who speak Spanish, but we have half the community that speaks Spanish," he said.

How people viewed police in their home countries can color how they perceive police in Hazleton.

"Cops are the last people you want to show up at your house in third-world countries," he said.

DeAndrea seeks to overcome those biases, but also gain trust of people wary of authority since Hazleton passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act in 2006.

The murder of Derek Kichline in May 2006 provoked city officials to support the act because suspects in the case had no permission to live in the United States.

Victims in other cases, however, such as the 2005 murder of Julio Angel Mojca Calderon, were undocumented immigrants.

Hazleton's act would have penalized businesses for hiring undocumented immigrants and landlords for renting to them.

Some people reportedly left Hazleton when the act was proposed. Latinos and Anglos held competing protests in front of City Hall when city council prepared to vote on the law, but the law has become less of an issue since then.

It never took effect because federal judges ruled it unconstitutional.

The 8-year case ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city's appeal on March 3.

"We're trying to heal wounds and move forward," DeAndrea said.

New paint schemes for police vehicles are part of his effort to present police in a new light to residents.

In a recent case involving the killing of one person and an assault on another, the woman who survived the assault was an undocumented immigrant.

Police referred her to a federal agency that is helping her obtain a U Visa, which allows crime victims to live and work in the United States while they help police solve the cases with which they're involved.

"It's not legal to mistreat anyone," DeAndrea said.

kjackson@standardspeaker.com

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